How to fix MNK. For real this time.

So we all know the attempt to help get monk back on its feet last year came short of doing anything significant, and we still get laughed at for entertaining the notion of playing the job. In hopes that this might reach the eyes of the devs, let's go over what's holding monk back, and present the simplest ways to adjust it, in order to bring monk back to its role in the game. This is from the perspective of endgame play, as lower difficulty content is easy enough to allow the use of any job.

What is causing monk to be dismissed for events today is quite simple. It is a damage dealer intended to contribute to the encounters with increased survivability for themselves and others, and they fall short on both ends.

Damage:

Their dps is unreasonably low due, not to their white damage from punches and kicks, but to their very lackluster arsenal of weapon skills. In today's game, we have a meta that has allowed for melee damage to be viable, thanks to a lot of buffs and much more powerful gear that allow for a higher frequency of weapon skill use than last time monks were viable. Monks however lack weapon skills that allow them to keep up with any job able to utilize weapon skills such as Chant du Cygne, Resolution, Torcleaver, Tachi: Fudo, Rudra's Storm, Last Stand, etc. This is the primary issue with monks right now, and needs to be addressed. Many have voiced concerns about Puppetmaster receiving too strong of a buff if this were to be fixed, which I can see the reasoning behind. The two jobs require very different setups and buffs however, so I do not see this becoming an issue. (An alternative would be to focus on Ascetic's Fury otherwise.) In order to deal with this issue, let's compare some WSs that share traits with the obvious choices for receiving adjustments, Victory Smite and Shijin Spiral:

Looking at these, it's clear why Chant du Cygne and Resolution are viable, wheras Victory Smite and Shijin Spiral are not. The main issue is not having their fTP modifier carry across all hits of the weapon skill. Simply making some changes to Victory Smite and/or Shijin Spiral would be all that is required. An example of what could be:

Their contribution to the group's survivability was once very attractive to parties and alliances, thanks to mantra, penance, and chakra allowing monks to take some of the load off of healers during heavy debuff/damage situations. With the gear improving over the years, the impact monks have in this regard is greatly diminished. However, thanks to mantra and penance being percentage based, this could still be enough as long as monks could once again contribute to damage in a meaningful way.
The only major change I would suggest in regards to these abilities would be to change mantra's hp boost to be based on a % of the monk's max hp at the time of use, instead of giving everyone an individual % boost.

Other issues:

First off; Relics, Empyreans and Mythics are all over the endgame scene, and they are for the most part great. However, the hand-to-hand weapons are severely nerfed by not having the aftermath effects (or relic damage multiplier) trigger on the offhand swing. This causes Glanzfaust, Verethragna, and Spharai to operate at half efficiency compared to every other weapon class's counterpart. Fixed easily by allowing the offhand to proc these effects.

Issue second; Accuracy cap. Why it was decided to give the main hand for 1handed weapons a 99% acc cap, when they are the ones who needed it the least is beyond my comprehension. Even more so however, is why hand-to-hand was not included in this change. This is more of a game balance issue than a monk issue, but hopefully the acc cap can either be raised to 99% on all weapons, or just be 100% like it always should have been. Nothing is worse than not having control over your reliability in a group. And missing at 500% the rate of 1handed dps with equal accuracy gear is not really acceptable.

The last major issue that has more recently become apparent, due to the stats on gear increasing over time, is the lack of a Sub slot gear piece. This is a huge amount of acc/atk/hp/wsmod, if you look at Utu Grip for example, that monk is completely missing out on. An easy change would be to simply allow grips to be equipped.

To summarize; Adjust Victory Smite and/or Shijin Spiral to carry fTP and we're good. Making changes to the other things mentioned would also be a great help, but fixing those WSs would allow us to play the job again.

So please, Dev team. Show us that you care. We miss playing our monks.

Whether or not monk's white damage is good is irrelevant though. They are roughly putting out somewhere between 50-70% of the damage an equally buffed and geared DD of a different job is. If you increase the damage of the weapon skills to put monks within 10% of the pack, the white damage doesn't affect that change. Counters also do not really factor in, as they are not a reliable source of damage. Counter is a nice semi unique defensive feature to monk, but you can't counter TP moves or magic, you gain no TP from it, and the overall damage dealt from counters is negligible in an endgame scenario, even if you were to tank the entire fight. Exception being perhaps if the mob used hundred fists, but then WAR with retaliation and arke gear is still leagues ahead on dps resulting from that.

The main reasons monk was so prevalent in the times you are referencing are also no longer present. We're no longer using crit atmas in abyssea, more jobs than monk have ilvl weapons, there's more defensive gear available to DDs than blackbelt, twilight torque and dring, and we're not in need of a job to cover several NMs' gimmicks in the same instance. Other jobs often failed to bring anything of value to the fights aside from their damage, and that's just no longer the case.

You forget that the next bigupdate will be abyssea V2 for Empyrean+3 so, yes, yes, we WILL be using Crit atmas, and right back to the MNK onry mentality. So.

You need to see the whole picture, not the right now. Monk had a very long time as the ONLY job, logically it needed a downtime (right now) it will be back (abyssea v2). If you buff it before that, you break it later.

I don't subscribe to the mindset that since the game was unbalanced in something's favor previously, it should now be unbalanced to its detriment. To me that feels rather petty, and unhealthy for the game. There's also no point in us basing our reasoning in very specific hypothetical future scenarios. We can assume af3 will receive an event in the future, and it would make sense if it was related to abyssea sure (omen isn't exactly limbus so we're 50/50 on af upgrade events being related to the old systems). We have no confirmation, to my knowledge, that even that will be the case though. Even less so that the new event would be using the old atma system.
Bottom line; Balance the game for what it is today, and don't introduce content that breaks that balance, unless you adjust it again when that time comes.

You forget that the next bigupdate will be abyssea V2 for Empyrean+3 so, yes, yes, we WILL be using Crit atmas, and right back to the MNK onry mentality. So.

You need to see the whole picture, not the right now. Monk had a very long time as the ONLY job, logically it needed a downtime (right now) it will be back (abyssea v2). If you buff it before that, you break it later.

We have no idea what the next Big Thing will be. Anything regarding such is 100.0% rear-end pulled speculation, so please don't try to spread misinformation. :-|

As far as MNK goes, I agree that it had too long a day in the sun and that the devs are not likely to allow it to become dominant again. There is no reason why it needs to be as far below others in general though and H2H WS could indeed stand a buff. Personally, I get the feeling that the main "con" for the devs on this matter is that any direct buff to WS will also affect PUP. SE has a proven track record of not knowing how they should handle pet jobs, and I would be surprised if the devs were not worried enough about PUP's combined master+pet damage potential that MNK suffering is just collateral damage.

(4)

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

I'd just like to contribute a few observations to this.
The first argument I've heard countless times is being worried about making PUP too awesome by doing any updates for MNK. Why? Because they've literally changed PUP Only in the past to have, now, the same H2H Skill as MNK, they've given it many martial art traits, through gifts, to have pretty much the same delay as a MNK (-5 Delay Difference in the two jobs)--If this were a valid argument at any point, Why did PUP only get all these enhancements, they even game them Asuran Fists when it was originally MNK only. I know today Asuran Fists is a joke, but what isn't on MNK. I'm more providing facts that these are two different jobs; you can buff one without touching the other; as I've pointed out, this has already happened multiple times—fix Monk.

Most comments I've read on 'what to fix' are generally correct. When you have other Jobs constantly doing 2x, 4x our Weapon Skill Damage. Then they make a Skill chain equal or sometimes double that our white numbers don't mean a thing. I've seen COR do 90k WSs in Dynamis followed by a 99k skill chain. MNK will never touch that in their wildest dreams; or rather only in their wildest dreams.

They also do Weapon Skills nearly twice as fast, our TP Gain is damaged. I can wear tons of multi attack and TP gain, and I don't care what the melee job is, equally geared I'm doing roughly 1/2 to 1/3 the Weapon Skills that they are and for around 1/2 to 1/4 the damage. I'm well geared and have a lot of swap sets for my Weapon Skills. It's not lack of gear or skill, it's that Monk TP is garbage and our H2H Weapon Skills have garbage fTP attributes on them. There is no amount of skill and gear that will fix that—fix Monk.

I love my MNK, I wouldn't play it otherwise, but most often I'm either told 'no' or just laughed out of an event if I even consider offering to bring it; just the idea MNK can be useful in current end-game is a joke. I’ve finished Relic +3 5/5 on MNK. With that you’d think it’d be amazing to bring to dynamis? I mean I’m literally wearing the top gear of that content, bringing it to that content; this is not the case, and you guessed it—fix Monk.

This isn't a feel bad for me or compliment me, it's just the raw facts about it. I do not want Monk to be the best by any means. I loved it before it was bandwagon and I choose it, even now, when I can find friends to tolerate the suck of me bringing it for damage--I have fun.

I do want for it to be an option. If a fight needs a generic DD, some source of melee; I just want to be considered with the Sam, Blu, Drk, War etc... I'd just like it as a viable alternative; not the joke that it is.

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Monk is:

ATT starved; give it smite closer to what a DRK gets.
fTP deficient; give it fTP the carries across hits like nearly all other jobs get, or increase the fTP bonuses—pretty simple, adjust to shoot for 25~30k Weapon Skills, no higher, Let DRK keep their 45k Reso; I do not want bandwagon Monk.
Very low TP gain; most jobs can get full 1k TP to do a Weapon Skill in 4 or 5 hits. Monk needs far more than that. I don’t understand how our TP Gain works, but I know compared to all other 20 Jobs, it’s super bad.

Monk is fine. OP plays in a linkshell that 18 mans the entire game so he'll never see a purpose for monk. It's not meant for that type of playstyle, and you're always going to be better off coming another job when you TP burn things with 18.

It's niche and uniqueness are for lowmanning, not 18 manning. Monk cannot be buffed to fit into 18 man zergs without breaking the game for lowman groups. Not every job needs to be good in every situation, that'd be bad for the game.

Monk is fine.

Sincerely, someone who plays monk for it's unique niche situational uses(which there are actually many of)

This game has 22 Jobs. Some of the current end-game—Omen and Dynamis-Divergence, for example, have gear for all of them.

For example, Monk has an Artifact and a Relic Armor set that you can obtain/upgrade by doing these events.

I have no idea why there would be equipment for a Job in either of these contents, for example, when the Job is not meant to be a part of it; that makes no sense, Shiyo.

The issue is Monk cannot bring anything to the table. So sticking with the above example, in the past Monk would bring reasonable; sometimes top damage, to their lower level analog—Dynamis and Limbus parties. These original parties were 18 man parties. The short and sweet of it; it did fine in end-game and in 18 man setups respectfully.

Ever since level cap has been raised from 75, Monk has only gone down hill. Its mechanics operate much differently from the other Jobs and this was not at all taken into account by development—raising level cap and creating ilvl to go up even further broke Monk and they still have yet to address this issue. That’s why Chi Blast pre and post Boost update is garbage; it literally, with top MND gear, is only able to do roughly 2k damage. At level 75, this was a god-killer; Kirin for example.

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To the point, Monk brought damage to parties and alliances. It did have some survivability and limited but helpful tanking in some situations, but the bulk and heart of it was bringing damage. Monk brings nothing to a party now.

All jobs were given an HP increase which completely takes away from the fact that Monk has HP Max Boost; survival feels no different than that of a BLU, WAR, SAM etc.

Monk never did bring support buffs beyond having Mantra which was nice for short burst, but the cool-down on it didn’t and still doesn’t make it a reliable buff like an actual support job’s buffing.

The bottom-line, in all the ways you can contribute to a party Monk falls least on every category. It does not do top or even remotely close to top damage anymore (it used to). It doesn’t offer support, buffs or healing. It’s not able to tank anything end-game; all jobs have that survival HP that was once unique to Monk. This is all the Monk player’s complaints, mine included—for end-game Monk is useless.

Most of us do not want to make a COR or BLU just because development decided; lets give it all to these classes—they can do tons of supporting and/buffing, and in addition to that, do top damage in pretty much all end-game. At 75 Monk equaled on some and topped on other fights with a well geared War, Drk. They’re severely diminished since raising the cap from 75.

I know I’ve stated this already, but I really need to say it a final time because I feel I’ve failed to make this point. Development NEVER fixed Monk since they broke it. The only attempt they made was making all our weapons have a higher DMG+ value on them. Which did really help our white numbers, but this did nothing for malfunctioning TP Gain or our low damage Weapon Skills. I want to do reasonable numbers to the other damage dealing jobs (just like I use to) not retire it because development doesn’t know how to fix what they broke.

It’s annoying that it’s taken this long and has still yet to have been fixed since they’ve broken it—fix your shit SE… please.